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How to Optimize Your Pictures For Facebook

Uploading pictures for Facebook can be so tricky, can’t it? Have you ever looked at a picture and thought, “Man, this would make a great cover photo” or “This could be a beautiful profile picture?” So you tried it, and then it turns out the thumbnail focuses on the wrong place, or your photo is too big, or it just doesn’t capture the feeling? It’s probably because you have the wrong size!

there is a fairly easy solution to all of this though! You can upload your picture to iPiccy Photo Editor, and once you’ve done that, iPiccy will display how large your image is in pixels in the top left corner. Afterwards, you can click “Resize Image” or “Crop Picture” depending on your needs. We’re talking about Facebook today though, so let’s optimize for that.

 

Facebook Cover Photos

The optimal resolution for a Facebook cover photo is 851 x 315. So first, we will take the image we want and upload it to iPiccy.

winter-271815_960_720

This picture, in it’s full size is 960 x 720. In this case, I will use the “Crop Picture” tool, and proceed to take out the section I want. Before I pick what section though, I need to pick the optimal cropping size, which if you remember I listed at 851 x 315 for cover photos. So we will select that as our parameters for cropping. After we do so, we just select the portion of the picture we want, and voilà! We have a perfect cover photo.

winter-cover photo2

 

Facebook Profile Pictures

There have been plenty of times where I’ve uploaded pictures to Facebook, and Facebook auto adjusted the thumbnail in a way I really disliked. So how can you force your thumbnail to be the picture you want it to be? You can definitely use the “Crop Picture” function if you want, but in this case, it may be better to use the “Resize Image” function of iPiccy. The optimal size for a Facebook profile picture is 180 x 180.

Let’s use this picture of Gisele Bundchen as an example.

Gisele_B_edit

If we were to upload this straight to Facebook, we’d likely have to deal with sides being cut off, not showing enough of your hair, or the picture being uncomfortably close to the face. You end up with problems like this:

Gisele Zoomed

Facebook has done a pretty decent job of allowing you certain options when you upload pictures to edit it to way you want. However, the much easier method to fixing this though would be uploading it to iPiccy, and simply using the “Resize Image” (It will work better if you crop your image to a square resolution first) tool and resizing this image to 180 x 180 to perfectly fit in your Facebook profile picture. And if we do that, our Mickey now looks like this:

Gisele_B_180x180

And the picture now perfectly fits in the profile picture slot.

The most important thing when optimizing your pictures is to have the correct resolution. While the arguably most important parts of a Facebook profile are the profile picture and cover photo, you may also be interested in these resolutions.

  • Timeline Image – 1200 x 630
  • Shared Link – 1200 x 627
  • App Image – 111 x 74

So what are you waiting for? Upload your pictures to iPiccy and start optimizing your photos!

If you’re interested in writing a guest spot for iPiccy you can check out this guide. If you’re simply interested in submitting some of your work, contact us on any of our social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest)   with a link to your work and a short blurb about yourself.